In this Making Leaders interview, we hear from Julie Newman, one of three recipients of SSPI’s Promise Award in 2023. Julie Newman is Program Chief Engineer for Satelit Nusantara Lima N5 (SNL), a major geostationary communications satellite program, at Boeing. In this role, she has been instrumental in overseeing risk management and problem resolution for the satellite, particularly in the midst of a challenging shift to a different payload. Julie regularly directs and approves the work of senior engineering staff and provides recommendations to the program management office and the customer. She has also represented her executive manager in various critical functions, ranging from safety to quality assurance across Boeing’s El Segundo site and has spearheaded multiple process improvement initiatives, including major efforts to improve Boeing’s engineering training and metrics tracking systems. Before taking on her current position, Julie was the Technical Program Manager, a role in which she led a team of 15 engineers to develop the engine controller assembly for the Space Launch System (SLS) first stage rocket. The team consistently exceeded expectations under her leadership while executing a late re-design of the unit to resolve a leakage issue associated with a sneak path discovered during testing of the engineering model. Julie is a graduate of Caltech with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering.

Before joining Boeing, Julie served as the Technical Manager & Lead Electronics Hardware Designer for the radar instrument of the Europa Clipper Mission, which will provide detailed mapping of the surface and sub-surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa in order to identify areas most likely to harbor extraterrestrial life. When a late-breaking radiation lot-test failure threatened to derail the entire program, she came up with an innovative discrete component solution that allowed her to remove the suspect integrated circuit and redeem the hardware’s necessary high radiation tolerance. Read more about Julie.